For all my old heads – tell me I’m lyin’. Back in the day, if you played pickup basketball, you damn sure didn’t show up to a game wearing a Michael Jordan jersey. If you did, you’d better believe you’d have everybody coming for your ass on that court. Dudes would go out of their way to foul you or make sure you understood your place in the pecking order. There used to be an unwritten rule that one should never ever ever show up to the court wearing the jersey of a great player *unless* you really actually did have the juice and knew without a shadow of a doubt, that you could actually dominate the court. And you better dominate. In 20+ years of playing pickup games, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I saw someone at the courts wearing a MJ jersey or a Kobe jersey…and I don’t think I ever saw them dominate the court, not even once. It actually became a bit of a running joke – nobody I know would have worn one, and anyone who found themselves in one really couldn’t ball worth a damn. ⁣
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I had to google this because I totally forgot which championship run this was – but I remember the year Kobe decided to put that unwritten rule to the test. During one postseason run – Kobe showed up to each and every finals game wearing the jersey(s) of other great athletes. ⁣
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Here’s a pic of him wearing Joe Namath, Wayne Gretzky, Jackie Robinson, and Michael Jordan jerseys. Funny enough, he wore the Jordan jersey the night that they swept the New Jersey Nets in 2002 to win their third straight championship…⁣
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I guess you could say Kobe had the juice. ⁣